IC: Daria - A Crashing Encounter
by satoshitajiri
Summary: Written for Shiva's Iron Chef "Daria wrecks a car." It's a massively modified and improved version of the one I posted on PPMB (I think so, anyway). The plot in a nutshell: Daria wrecks a car. Enjoy.


Daria only realised that something was wrong when she was suddenly perpendicular to the rest of the world; a sense of numb horror gripped her as the car sailed through the air, having collided with an embankment that separated the road from the walking path that ran adjacent to it. Still, the terror clutching her soul was nothing compared to the loathing she felt at knowing she shouldn't even have been behind the wheel of a car in the first place; Daria's eyesight was terrible, and her thick-rimmed glasses didn't offer her anything in the way of peripheral vision. If asked, she could claim with some honesty that the grassy mound had taken her by surprise. _Assuming_, she thought detachedly, _I make it through the impact in one piece_.

The car came in for a landing, and Daria could feel the shuddering impact all the way up her spine; she was dimly aware of the fact that, had she neglected her seat-belt, she would've made an impressive smear along the length of the highway. It kept her firmly pressed to the seat while maps, lighters, papers and coins went flying everywhere in the cabin. She tried to think of any other time she'd done something as monumentally bone-headed as this, but was drawing a blank, as anything not related to being in a traffic collision had been, surprisingly, forced from her mind.

For the next thirty seconds or so, until the car came to a halt, her fate was not in her own hands, so she contented herself with finding new ways to berate her towering stupidity. Why had she been driving so fast in the first place? A pointless argument with her family about something she couldn't even remember at the moment. The sudden, agonising need to be as far away from them as possible had made her lose sight of just how much pressure she was bringing to bear on the accelerator; any harder, she would've put her combat-booted feet right through the floor.

With a yowl of screeching metal and shattering glass, the wrecked vehicle came to a standstill; Daria waited a moment, wondering when the inevitable fireball was going to spark into being and incinerate her. She shook her head, trying to clear such pusillanimous and unhelpful thoughts from her mind. The girl freed herself from the seatbelt, killed the engine, then tried to open the door, but it refused to budge. The frame had buckled under the force of the impact, and it took all of Daria's meagre strength in order to create an opening wide enough to get even her skinny physique through.

It was with a complete absence of emotion that Daria surveyed the damage she had caused: an eight-hundred-yard long gash had been torn in the fabric of the road, courtesy of the car's heavy roof digging into it while skidding out of control. The car itself was a complete write-off; the roof had been all but sheared off, and Daria listlessly imagined how close her own head had come to doing likewise, the sides were bashed and dented, and the hood had torn itself loose somewhere along the way, exposing the machine's innards.

Using what remained of the car's left-hand wing mirror, Daria tried to assess her own status; the glass had punctured her clothes, to say nothing of her skin, and she was covered in a network of tiny scratches. Blood was pooling on some of the more severe cuts, but she certainly didn't feel as though she'd acquired any major injuries. That said, it could often be hours later before you discovered you'd fractured your spine, or picked up some soft-tissue damage that would be with you for the rest of your life.

Reaching into the pocket of her battered green jacket, she retrieved a mobile 'phone – she hadn't wanted it, but her parents insisted, more so when she had started _dating_, that she be contactable at all times – unaware of how much her trembling fingers made it impossible to dial; it seemed that her mind had been disconnected from her body somewhere along the way, probably as a result of shock. It was a disgusting feeling, losing control of one's own body, and a disquieting sensation settled on her stomach. She felt sick. Sick at herself for being so stupid to take the car in the first place, knowing full well she wouldn't get very far in her angered state.

"Hello?" said a groggy voice at the other end of the line. Typical. Even though it was relatively early in the evening still, Jane had already been dozing off.

Daria tried to marshal her disparate thoughts, but they were like raindrops on a window; she was so used to keeping her mind under strict focus, but now inanities were bubbling away at her under the surface. It was difficult to think of _anything_ other than the wrecked car and how close she'd come to disaster; she couldn't quiet the internal voice calling her a _moron_, nor could she particularly disagree with its assessment. "Hey, Jane. Uh, I've just been in an accident."

There was a pause, then, "My God, are you all right?"

_Am I?_ Daria still couldn't feel any pain, even from the multitude of tiny blemishes criss-crossing her body, but the part of her that remained steadfastly logical knew that people who thought they were fine after an accident usually had serious problems, while those who thought they'd broken something just had a minor sprain. "Um, I'm fine, but the car isn't." She managed a rueful smile, despite the circumstances, even though her friend couldn't see it. "I don't think my parents are going to be too happy about it. They've been complaining quite a bit about the insurance premiums."

"Is that why you called me, then?" Jane asked, using the tone of voice normally reserved for when she felt that her friend was doing something ridiculous. It wasn't all that often she got to employ it, so there was an undercurrent of relish to her tone that Daria didn't quite appreciate, given the situation. "So that they wouldn't find out what happened?"

"No, not exactly," replied Daria, frowning. "Um, I just dialled the first number that came to mind, and it happened to be yours."

"Oh, well, I'm touched," Jane said. "Whereabouts are you, exactly? Am I going to have to mount a search party to come rescue you?"

Daria quickly gave her the location, and it was only some fifteen minutes or so before her parents turned up, Jane in tow, in her mother's car. In silence, Helen and Jake studied the vehicle that their daughter had demolished; she could see the anger on their faces, but it was quickly replaced by familial concern. They hugged her tightly, and grew slightly embarrassed; it was awkward, as it always was when her family displayed affection, but it was from the heart, and right now, she needed that more than anything else. A family could love each other very much, but they didn't always _like_ each other, and that was how Daria felt a lot of the time.

The next few hours were as much a blur as the crash itself had been; there was the typical interminable wait in the emergency room, while white-coated medics rushed from room-to-room, barely able to keep a lid on the frenzied, coffee-and-energy-drink-fuelled furore that propelled them through the day. After what seemed like an Ice Age or two, Daria's name was called and she followed a nurse into one of the little examination rooms.

Now that the adrenaline had worn off, and the shock of the accident had subsided to a dull ache in her throat, Daria was now aware of just how much she hurt; not just from the myriad cuts, but she couldn't move her neck too far either to the left or the right. The nurse muttered something darkly about possible spinal damage. Daria's stomach did something she hadn't been prepared for, but fortunately, there was a bag nearby that she could noisily vomit into. Looking up with small, sad eyes, she seemed even younger. "Sorry."

"Forget about it," the nurse said kindly. "It happens quite a bit in here. But you have to stay absolutely still for a moment while I examine your back." With practised, delicate strokes, she worked her way down the girl's back, following the line of her vertebrae; she was about two-thirds of the way down when Daria uttered a sharp cry, and the nurse said, "Ah, I think we've got it. It was probably from the initial impact, when you were forced back into your seat. You must've been going quite fast."

An x-ray showed that Daria's fourth lumbar vertebrae had been knocked slightly out of position, and it was pushing through the soft tissue causing a herniation; it would hurt like hell for a month or so, but it would eventually heal, and she was lucky to get away with nothing more detrimental than that. "You'll have to neck painkillers like a junkie," the nurse was saying, "and you'll have some pain in your arms and legs from the affected nerve roots, but … well, you'll just have to get used to that."

Now suitably bandaged, and a little wiser, Daria regrouped with her parents and Jane; she knew that it could've been so much worse, and that she was incredibly lucky to have gotten away with so few consequences. It seemed that same thought was on her parents' minds, too, as they were looking at her with pure concern on their faces. Daria finally broke down; her emotional barricades had all but been destroyed by the traumatic events, and the knowledge of what her family would've gone through if she'd died. "I'm so sorry," she said, throwing herself at them and holding them close. "I'm so sorry about the car."

"Hey, don't worry about it, kiddo," her father said kindly, returning her bear-hug with one of his own. "We can always get a new car, but we can never get a new Daria."


End file.
